16 May 2012

My 7 year old Dell Inspiron 630m WinXP laptop has been restored to "as factory settings" to properly clean it out of files detritus that had accumulated over the period despite numerous defrags, ccleaner clean-ups and deletion of unwanted files. I've loaded Windows service packs, McAfee etc and all seems to be well ....apart from one small annoying issue: I keep getting a pop up box telling me I need a file called sonicencoders.msi to install some software which I think is to do with some Sonic software for DVD burning. This never goes away and it tells me the file is on a D/ drive which I don't have access to. This is a partition allowing full and partial restores on a Dell machine.

Searching the internet it appears this is a very common issue yet no-one seems to be able to tell me where to find this file which I appear to need to even delete the files that are causing the problem. Ccleaner doesn't allow me to delete it, neither does the usual Windows add/remove programs.

When I first had the PC, from my son about 5 years ago, I seem to vaguely recall having the same issue and I managed to fix it but I haven't a clue what I did back then.

Anyone know how to get this file or how to stop the annoying pop-up message? I am not a PC expert at all by the way, so keep it very simple. Ideally someone please email me the file and put me out of my misery.

4 comments:

this happens on startup? could check a couple of things: the "startup" folder in your start menu, and a couple of registry keys that deal with startup stuffs. I would've thought cccleaner thing would find that and remove it... here's an MS article about the registry stuff: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/179365 ... I wish I had something simpler to give you, and alas it is difficult not being around the machine. - kd8mek

I found mine in the C:\Windows\Installer folder.But, it was not named SonicEncoders.msi.It was named 51461.msi (about 240 Kb).

I found it by copying all the MSI files from that folder into a temporary folder.I then renamed all the temporary MSI files to *.TXT.This allowed the windows search tool to search inside the files for the string "sonicencoders".